The Center for the Study of Intelligence
(U) The Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) was founded in 1974 in response to Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger's desire to create within CIA an organization that could "think through the functions of intelli­ gence and bring the best intellects available to bear on intelligence problems." The Center, comprising professional historians and experienced practitioners, attempts to document lessons learned from past activities, explore the needs and expectations of intelligence consumers, and stimulate serious debate on current and future intelligence challenges.
(U) To carry out its mission, CSI publishes Studies in Intelligence and books and monographs addressing historical, operational, doctrinal, and theoretical aspects of the intelligence profession. It also administers the CIA Museum and main­ tains the Agency's Historical Intelligence Collection.
Comments and questions may be addressed to:
Center for the Study of Intelligence Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, DC 20505
The other works of Thomas L Ahern, Jr., published in this series by the Center for the Study of Intelligence are:
• The Way We Do Things: Black Entry Operations Into North Vietnam,
1961-19640 I • Good Questions, Wrong Answers: CIA sEstimates ofArms lra~c
Through Sihanoukville, Cambodia During the Vietnam War (2004,
I I • CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam 0(2001, II I L--_
• CIA and the House ofNgo: Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954-630 (2000, I I
, :
Thomas L. Ahem, Jr.
Central Intelligence Agency
Chapter Twelve Introduction to InterdictionD 257
Chapter Thirteen 1he High Water MarO 275
Chapter Fourteen . A Holding OperationD 297
Chapter Fifteen The "Mea Heartland"D 323
PART THREE: 1970-72 347
Chapter Seventeen I 1 373
Chapter Eighteen Sting Like a BeeD 407
Chapter Nineteen Vietnamization and EscalationD : 421
Chapter Twenty . Red Light at the End of the TunneID 443
EPILOGUE: 1973-75 483
Chronology 531
Index 553
Laos topographical map.O xxi
Communist-controlled areas in Laos, 1962D xxiii
Southern Laos village security program, mid-19660 xxiv
Communist-controlled roads, c. May 1964D xxv
Principalfeatures of the Ho Chi Minh Trail network, early 1972D xxvi
Support facilities for combat air operations over Laos and North VietnamD xxvii
Comparison ofcontrolled areas, 1962 vs. 1970 xxviii
P~;;::e~~:gn;~::~~;~~tar 229
Tactical situation in MR 2, mid-April 1970D 340
Tactical situation in Lang Tieng-Sam Thong sector, c. late June 19700 344
Southern Laos interdiction operations as of4 July 19700 362
Phase I ofSouth Laos interdiction' . operations, August 19700 366
Phase 11 ofSouth Laos interdiction operations, October 19700 , 368
Dry-season tactical objectives in northern Laos, 1970-71D 389
Tactical situation in MR 2 as of5 January 19710 391
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Planned offensive west of the Plain ofJars, 3 March 1971D 397
Planned offensive against the . Plain ofJars, 21 June 19710 .426
Tactical Situation in MR 2 as ofJuly 19710 430
Tactical situation in late December 19710 436
Tactical situation in MR 2 in early January 19720 442
Planned offensive operations in MR 2 as February 19720 .450,
Planning for second phase of Operation 1 114 March 19720 452
Phase'! ofOperation I I August 197L:]. 464
P~;~~~::~a;~;25 ! 468
p~::;;n~:~;,~:e:r;~;;b 1, 476
Tactical situation on the Bolovens Plateau as of 15 December 19720, 478
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BG
CASI
CAT
CIA
CINCPAC
CDNI
COS
DDP
DRV
FAC
FAR
Helio
ICC
KMT
MAAG
MACV
NATO
NLHS
ABBREVIATIONS
Continental Air Services International
Civil Air Transport. the Taiwan-based airline that grew out of Gen. Claire Chennault's "Flying Tigcrs"
Central Intelligence Agency
Commander-in-Chief Pacific of US armed forecs
Committee for the Defense of the National Interest. an informal association of anticommunist Lao political and military leaders
Chief of Station
Helio-Courier, a single-engine. fixed-wing STOL aircraft
International Control Commission
Kuornintang, the political party of Gen. Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalists
Military Assistance Advisory Group
Military Assistance Command Vietnam
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Neo Lao Hak Sat. the political front of the communist Pathet Lao
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Program Evaluation Office of the US Operations Mission in Vientiane .
Provisional Government of National Union
Royal Laotian Government
Royal Thai Army
Southeast Asia CoordinationCommittee, composed of the MAC V commander and the US ambassadors to South Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
Special National Intelligence Estimate
Special Operations Group, a MACV element staffed by the US Army Special Forces
Special Operations Team
United States Agency for International Development
United States Operations Mission, a field office of the Agency for International Development
Washington Special Action Group, the interagency body charged with oversight of covert action
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INTRODUCTION
The Cork in the BottleD
The day before his inauguration as president of the United States, John F. Kennedy met President Dwight D. Eisenhower and several cabinet officers at the White House. Kennedy had solicited the meeting, partly for cosmetic rea­ sons-"reassuring the publie as to the harmony of the transition"-but also because he was, in his own words, "anxious to get some commitment from the outgoing administration as to how they would deal with Laos." Receiving Kennedy in the Cabinet Room on 19 January 1961, Eisenhower and his advis­ ers had more to say about the tiny country's strategic importance than about specific means of keeping the "cork in the bOtllOe" as they put it, to prevent communist dominion over most of the Far East I
The Western-oriented Royal Laotian Government (RLG) was tbreatened both by an army mutiny and by a North Vietnamese-sponsored communist insurgent movement, the Pathet Lao. The mutinous RLG units were the army's best, certainly capable of taking on the best of the dissident forces. But most of the army reflected the lethargy of its officer corps, which was drawn from the colonial elite that had served the French, and now lacked either the energy or the legitimacy for effective leadershipD
Well aware of its own military impotence, the RLG feared that asking the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to intercede would only pro­ voke further North Vietnamese incursions. Eisenhower recognized Laotian anxiety, but thought that if the country fell to the communists, "it would bring unbelievable pressure to bear on Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam." He considered Laos so important that, in the words of one Kennedy adviser, "If it reached the stage where we could not persuade others to act with us, then he would be willing, as a last desperate hope, to intervene unilaterally." 2D
It seems that Kennedy had to wait until he took office to learn of the airlift of weapons and equipment already on its way to a tiny village perched on one
I Memoranda by participants at the meeting, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, \/hlume XXiV, The Laos Crisis (hereafter cited as FRUS 196~-1963), 19-25 D
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2 Ibld., 25. Emphasis in original. Secretary of Defense McNamara, in a note to Kennedy on 24 January. recalled Eisenhower as having "advised against unilateral actionby theUnited States in connection with Laos," (See FRUS 196/-1963, 41.) More generally, this episode illustrates how complicated and elusivethe truth can be even about an apparently straightforward point of fact. Kennedy, too, recalled the president as having favored military intervention, and so did Dean Rusk. Even moreindeterminate is whatEisenhower's words, whatever they were, signaledabout what he would have done were he not leaving office. Richard Nixon. then his vice president, noted how the president's frequent "enthusiasjm] about half-baked ideas in thediscussion stage" contrasted with his decisionmaking style, that of the "coldest, most unemotional and analytical man in the world." (Fred I. Greenstein and Richard H. Immerman, "What Did Eisenhower Tell Kennedy About Indochina? The Politicsof Misperception," The Journal ofAmerican History 79, no. 2 [September 1992],) 0
L,..,.------~--~~~_-_~-~~ he Meo, a bitterly anti­ VIetnamese mountain people, had migrated from Yunnan Province in south- ern China. Numbering perhaps 500,000 in Laos, they became the core of an irregular force that fought the North Vietnamese Army until February 1973, when a Laotian cease-fire followed the agreement with Hanoi on terms to end the war in South Vietnam. Under their charismatic, mercurial leader Vang Pao, the Meo-more properly known as the Hmong--evolved from a hit-and­ run guerrilla outfit into light infantry operating in regimental strength. 3D
of the mountains covering northern Laos. In fact, the departing administration had already come upon a partial solution to the dilemma posed by its twin objectives, keeping the "cork in the bottle" while avoiding the risks of overt military intervention. Kennedy now accepted the Eisenhower formula: If nei­ ther the RLG nor America's SEATO partners wanted joint action, Washington would find surrogates to take up this latest challenge by the Sino-Soviet axis.
D Two such surrogates appeared in the conjunction of an Iron Age tribe, then
known to outsiders as the Mea, and
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The Agency initially aimed its paramilitary activity in Laos at saving that country from domination by North Vietnam and by Hanoi's own Laotian sur­ rogate, the Pathet Lao. Indeed, the preservation of a noncommunist Laos remained an American objective until the collapse of South Vietnam rendered the question moot in May 1975. But the emphasis changed over time. Until 1964, the main point of contention arose from North Vietnam's failure to withdraw any significant forces from Laos, while US-supported military pro­ grams there sought to resist Hanoi's encroachments.D
As the United States committed airpower to South Vietnam in 1964, and then ground troops in 1965, American policymakers increasingly saw Laos as a sideshow to the larger struggle between Saigon and Hanoi. In this secondary theater of operations, the antagonists' strategic positions reversed the situation found in Vietnam. In South Vietnam, mobile Viet Cong and North Vietnam­ ese units bedeviled Saigon's road-bound heavy infantry, while in Laos, Hmong irregulars flitted over mountain trails or moved by air to occupy key high ground and to harass Hanoi's tanks and artillery. This reversal of roles also reversed the seasonal alternation of tactical advantage in Laos, The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) advanced during the dry season, usually early November to late May, and gave ground to Hmong operations when the rains washed out the primitive road system.' D
--------------- Expanded Hmong forces I I
I Idefended Hmong terntory In the mountains of the northeast and diverted substantial North Vietnamese forces from South Viet­ nam. Meanwhile, with the creation of ethnic Lao guerrilla battalions in the Laotian Panhandle, CIA began in 1968 to contest Hanoi's use of Laotian terri- tory as a supply route to South Vietnam and Cambodia·1 I
I I The CIA station in Vientiane functioned as the ambassador's executive
agent for the conduct of the war. Its role stemmed from reluctance in both
4 Between t996 and 2000, BjljLairorovided voluminous information, in the Conn of interviews and written notes, on his own articipation in the warin Laos. Subsequent references to this material cite"Bill Lair." 5 The official nameof Hanoi'sarmy is the People's Army of Vietnam, The term was seldom used by US officials during the war, and this volume follows their practice of referring to it as the NVAD
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Washington and Vientiane to end Laotian neutrality. This would have abro­ gated the 1962 Geneva Agreements, which prohibited all foreign powers but the French from maintaining a military presence in Laos. Overtly committing US combat forces or even military advisers would imperil the basis for a negotiated peace, something the Kennedy administration shrank from doing. The upshot was that, in addition to deploying its own paramilitary resources, CIA often found itself mediating between the Vientiane embassy and MACV in Saigon. In this capacity, it worked to preserve the ambassador's authority
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over covert Laotian operations while also trying to get MACV to support them, especially with combat air.D
These efforts were generally successful, though occasionally only with White House intervention. The US Air Force and Navy provided indispens­ able air support to the irregulars, who bore most of the burden of ground com­ bat in Laos. Together, they compensated for the lassitude 'and incompetence, born of weak, corrupt leadership, of the government's regular army, the Forces Armees Royales (FAR). When large-scale operations ended with the cease-fire of February 1973, the Royal Laotian Government controlled nearly as much of its territory as it had in 1962, at the time of the Geneva Agree­ ments. Irregulars in the north had tied down as many as two divisions of Hanoi's troops while those in the Panhandle had supplemented massive US Air Force bombing with vigorous, if brief, forays into the Ho Chi Minh Trail network·D
The 1973 status quo in Laos survived until the fall of Saigon in May 1975, which brought collapse also in Vientiane and in Phnom Penh. But ultimate failure, in Laos at least, is an inadequate criterion by which to judge the qual­ ity of the effort devoted to a lost cause. CIA's performance there was certainly not without flaws, but the story of the "secret war" in Laos reveals an admira­ ble record of flexible, economical management and sound tactical judgment. An even more remarkable aspect of that record is the Agency's steady, prag­ matic accommodation of cultural sensitivities and of amorphous, competitive command relationships-Laotian, D and American. Finally-though doubtless important only to those who were there-the program became for nearly all its CIA participants the adventure of their professionallives.'D
7~-I who ran one of the Panhandle programs, expressed the consensus: An entry­ leve 0 fi~d it "pretty heady stuff' to beout at theend of the line in Laos. He was his own boss. with his own airplane, andhad'cergo aircraft andhelicopters on call to support the thousand­
.odd irregulars whodepended on him for eve thin - ny, food and supplies. training,ordnance, communications, and tactical direction
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LAOS
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Principal Inulin'.'! of the Ho Chi Minh Trail 1/('I" "Or/.;. early IY72
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NORTH VIETNAM~
... Thai .iflotU oas•• \I ••d by USAF
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Support facilities for combat air operations over Laos and North VietnanD
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PROLOGUE
Despite a chronic, uneasy sense of the fragility of their creation, US policy­ makers saw the first five years of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime as an unqualified success. North Vietnamese invasion had been deterred, and Diem was consol­ idating his control of the South Vietnamese countryside. The little kingdom of Laos mattered only as a potential domino, threatening its neighbors only in the event of North Vietnamese or communist Chinese invasion or subversion. D
In January 1960, what might be called the first Tet offensive challenged these illusions when coordinated Viet Cong attacks on rural outposts began a process of whittling away at Diem's hold on the countryside. By this time, in Laos, a government far weaker than Diem's was losing ground to the commu­ nist Pathet Lao. In August 1960, the army's best combat unit mutinied. The coup created a base of military support for neutralist elements It bj Prince Souvanna Phouma and set the stage for the conflict that followed
From 1955 until the 1960 coup, CIA covert action in Laos had concentrated on the search for enlightened elements within the tradional elite that it could support in a process of political modernization. This effort, like the one in South Vietnam, aimed at developing leadership whose genuine nationalism would not prevent it from accepting Agency guidance as it set out to win the consent of the governed. The 1960 coup nullified these efforts, and CIA, along with the rest of the US foreign policy establishment, now devoted itself to supporting military resistance to the threat of a communist takeover.D
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I
I'
CHAPTER ONE
Everybody's PawnD
Dien Bien Phu, where Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh defeated the French Expe­ ditionary Force in May 1954, lies only a few 'miles from Vietnam's border with northeastern Laos. Once a substantial power on the Indochinese penin­ sula, the Kingdom of Laos collapsed in the 18th century, splintering into three petty kingdoms that survived by appeasing their stronger Vietnamese andThai neighbors. The French reassembled the country when they imposed a protec­ torate in 1893 and ruled it until 1950, when they gave it independence more nominal than real. At the end of the First Indochina War, four years later, the tiny country had not ruled itself in more than 200 ,years.tD
By mid-1954, the Laotian communist front, the Pathet Lao, with help from Hanoi, had taken over de facto control of the two northern provinces of Phong Saly and Sam Neua.? Backed and essentially controlled by the Viet Minh, the Pathet Lao soon dominated parts of other provinces as well. There were as yet few signs of tension between the Soviets and the Chinese, and international communism still loomed as an alarming ideological specter, monolithic and full of revolutionary fervor. From this perspective, vulnerable Laos represented a potential "domino," which, if toppled by either North Vietnam or the peoPle', "?" of China, could fall on any of its four non­ communist neighbors. 3
. The Geneva Accords of July 1954, which accepted Viet Minh control of North Vietnam, neutralized Laos under a regime to be monitored by an Inter­ national Control Commission (ICC). The United States refused to sign the accords, which it regarded as unduly accommodating to the communists; but it promised to observe them and to help punish anyone who did not.40
I Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, entry on LaosD 2 Sam Neua was also known as Houa Phan. Contemporary transliterations are Phong Sali and Hua
Phan·D 3 Two authorities on Laotian politics in the 1950s and 1960s are Arthur Dornmen, Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization, and Charles A. Stevenson, The End of Nowhere: American Policy Toward Laos since 19540
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Chapter One
An early test of the neutrality formula came when the intransigent Pathet Lao regrouped its forces in the north, adding overt military occupation to its political control of Phong Saly and Sam Neua. The Laotian cabinet, the neu­ tralist Prince Souvanna Phouma among its members, unanimously requested Western military intervention to recover the two provinces. The French and the British "raised such a howl," as a Senate staff report put it, that the secre­ tary of state John Foster Dulles declined to comply. Nevertheless, although ruling out direct intervention, Washington now decided on a major effort to turn Laos into a buffer, confining the communists to the mountains of the north while a friendly government controlled the Mekong Valley·borders with Thailand and Cambodia.50
This effort took the form of a military assistance and advisory program that circumvented the provisions of the Geneva Accords prohibiting any for­ eign military presence other than a residual French mission. Called the Pro­ gram Evaluation Office (PEO) and nominally a part of the economic aid program, it surreptitiously equipped and trained regular units of the Forces ArmeesRoyalesi lin these early years, operated more in the political arena, concentrating on covert action designed to popularize the Vientiane government. But it kept a weather eye out for opportunities in the paramilitary sphere, and in 1955 had already considered clandestine support to the Hmong, mountain tribesmen previously allied with the French against the Viet Minh."D
------: ---,---_---,--- -----,,-,-----:---=-I After some success with harassment operations in Pathet Lao-controlled Phong Saly and Sam Neua Provinces, the…